The vivid thread of memories by the yard

WASHINGTON — People like to send fabrics to artist Suchitra Mattai. Her mother, who lives in Edison, New Jersey, home to one of the largest South Asian populations in the United States, collects saris from secondhand shops and mails them to her daughter, who lives in Los Angeles and is of Indo-Caribbean descent. Friends, relatives and friends of relatives all send their finds: silks, fringe, trim and more.

Some of Mattai’s loved ones send their own garments, too, made with precious threads and delicate materials. Her mother never holds back. For “Silent Retreat” (2023), Mattai incorporated one of her mother’s saris — an exquisite piece of fabric with intricate patterns — into a dazzling embroidered tapestry.

“My mom is completely detached from material things,” said Mattai, 51, describing Subhadra Mattai as someone who thrives in monthslong meditation retreats.

For her part, Suchitra Mattai is a material person. Her ancestors were indentured laborers who left Uttar Pradesh in India to work on sugar plantations in Guyana, on the northern coast of South America, and Mattai weaves her family stories into maximalist pieces that read like paintings. In “Silent Retreat” and other works, she used embroidery floss to color in the figures in the found tapestries that served as the base of her works. She describes this process of introducing people of color to pastoral European scenes as “brown reclamation.”

“Myth From Matter,” Mattai’s solo exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, through Jan. 12, showcases the artist’s magpie tendencies. With a cheeky presentation — artworks from historical collections in the city stand side by side with Mattai’s — the show also challenges fixed histories in art and labor.

Found tapestries serve as the foundation for Mattai’s pieces. Often they are needlepoint objects based on mass-produced kits or other commercial patterns. Mattai adds her own abstract or figurative elements by hand.

In pieces such as “Time Travelers” (2024), every decision that Mattai makes about materials points in a different direction, as if the installation were a kind of map. She started with a technique she calls “sari weaving,” winding strips of sari through an inch-by-inch grid of rope net, essentially embroidering her works with fabric.

Then she illuminated her tapestry with bindis: tiny, colorful, flat cosmetic beads, like the kind worn by family members who brought them from India to Guyana.

Strips of stretchy gold fabric like lamé hint at the elaborate costumes of Carnival. Mattai draws a line from the pageantry of Baroque court painting to the flair of South American festivals. Chevrons that appear to emanate from a celestial event over the mother and daughter at the center of the scene are made with an appliqué that Mattai picked up in the fashion district of Los Angeles.

Mattai found some of the ornamental elements on “Time Travelers,” like the beaded fringe and gold rope); others, like the blue and green saris and the silver tassels, were mailed by her mother and her mother’s best friend.

Ideas about handmade craft and mass production loom in Mattai’s work. She explores the material theme through a geopolitical lens, finding ways to contrast cultural exports under colonialism with techniques cultivated by native artisans. Mattai said that her grandmothers, one of whom was a professional seamstress, sewed her own clothes by hand: traditional Indian garments and everyday British fashion.

Although Mattai herself trained as a painter, she turned to textiles to “tell stories through the materials that made sense for those stories,” she said.

For a new series, Mattai collaged pages from “The Grammar of Ornament” (1856), a visual digest by British architect Owen Jones that compiled design patterns from cultures around the world. In works such as “A Moment of Rest” (2024), Mattai’s alterations underscore the imperial gaze of the Victorian-era project, taking back patterns on behalf of their subjects.

“Myth From Matter” is among Mattai’s first solo museum shows in the United States (others opened this year at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco and Tampa Museum of Art in Florida). It features about three dozen of her works, including large-scale sculpture, and takes up an entire floor at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Fresh off a $67.5 million renovation finished last year, the museum looks like it was made for this show, which includes “A Cosmic Awakening” (2023), a stunning 24-foot drape.

Some of the best sequences here include artworks from across continents and centuries. With the museum’s assistant curator, Hannah Shambroom, Mattai requested about 50 loans from Washington-area museums; a dozen are featured. The entire show could be seen as a response to Camille Pisarro’s “A Creek in St. Thomas (Virgin Islands)” (1856), an Impressionist landscape born in an era when Europe controlled the art world and the Caribbean.

While Mattai addresses her themes head on, she also points to them indirectly, introducing works by National Gallery stalwarts Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Auguste Rodin as her foils — a sly act of counter-curating. In “Future Perfect” (2023), Mattai embellishes a vintage needlepoint reproduction of a painting by Fragonard, “Young Girl Reading” (1769), giving the seated subject a powerful headdress of freshwater pearls. Mattai invests her subject with the wisdom of middle age. The embroidered painting hangs alongside Fragonard’s original.

She borrows from great female masters, too: A towering resin sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, “Legs” (1986), stands sentinel in a gallery that includes several works by Mattai that feature paired figures.

Mattai’s interest in tapestries flows partly from the way she gathers her materials. (“I’m not a hoarder,” she said, “but I’m a crazy flea market shopper.”) Tapestries reflect the myths embedded in religious stories and historical paintings (at a commercial scale). These found textiles are an easy figurative shorthand for a cosmos that Mattai wants to crack open — wide enough for her family and her history.

Women in Mattai’s adapted tapestries wear halos, but they’re not the modest gold leaf bands of Western iconography; rather they are exuberant embroidered floss in colorful displays. She sees every stitch and every sari as wearing down old boundaries.

“This exhibition is the undoing,” Mattai said. “The becoming has yet to happen.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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